Playing Chess with Putin

By BILL KELLER

September 10, 2013

On the list of principles compiled by the chess strategist Bill Wall, number 21 is “Do not make careless pawn moves. They cannot move back.” This is especially true if you are sitting across the board from Vladimir Putin, who comes from the motherland of chess masters.

Secretary of State John Kerry seemed to have played a careless pawn when he told a questioner at a news conference Monday that President Assad could avoid an American military strike if he agreed to have his poison gas placed under international control and ultimately destroyed.

“Turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting,” Kerry said Monday at a news conference. “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”

By day’s end Kerry’s comment had become the Putin proposal, endorsed (sort of) by Syria and (wholeheartedly) by the U.N. secretary general. It was the Russian president’s most headline-stealing stunt since he dressed up as an alpha bird, boarded a motorized glider and led a migration of endangered Siberian cranes.

I’m told by a senior administration official that Kerry’s comment was not as offhanded as it seemed. According to this official, Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, first discussed the idea back in the spring. They returned to it more seriously last week, and Putin and Obama talked about it at the G20 summit in St. Petersburg. The official said the administration sees the danger that the Russians or the U.N. will make it a delaying tactic, but that “in Kerry’s mind and in the President’s mind, it can be a win-win:” either you disarm Syria of its chemical weapons quickly and verifiably, or by exhausting a credible diplomatic option you win support for tougher measures against the Assad regime.

No doubt, ridding Syria of chemical weapons would be a great blessing, not least because it would get these horrible weapons beyond the reach of Assad’s Hezbollah allies and jihadi rebels. And if it opens the way for serious diplomacy aimed at ending the Syrian carnage, I will eat my hat – after tipping it in grateful salute to Kerry, Obama and Putin. At this stage, though, here’s what Putin seems to have accomplished:

a) He has stalled and possibly ended the threat that his client thug, President Bashar al-Assad, will be struck by American missiles for gassing his own people. As long as the international community is debating the endless complications of finding, verifying and locking down Assad’s chemical arsenal, Congress and the allies have ample excuse to do nothing.

b) He has diminished the already small prospect that the United States will attempt to shift the balance in Syria’s war. That sound you hear is John McCain’s head exploding.

c) He has further demoralized the Syrian resistance, and strengthened the jihadi radicals among them, by demonstrating that American red lines mean little.

d) He has recast Russia – whose military helped the Assad dynasty create its chemical weapons program in the first place – as the global peacemaker.

e) He has, incidentally, assured continued Syrian demand for Russian-made “conventional” ordnance, so that the extermination of Syrian civilians can proceed by marginally less inhumane means.

f) While seeming to help President Obama out of a political fix, he has made the American president seem even more the captive of events. A president who once seemed sure-footed, combining prudent diplomacy with the occasional bold stroke (killing Osama bin Laden) now stands accused of being, as his Texan predecessor might have put it, all hat and no cattle. He vowed to bring the Benghazi killers to justice, to stand against the return of military rule in Egypt, to arm the rebels in Syria, to enforce a red line against weapons of mass destruction. So far, he has accomplished none of the above.

The other day the neoconservative uber-hawk Norman Podhoretz offered a bizarre theory: that Obama, the “left-wing radical,” has actually embarked on a sly campaign to sabotage American influence in the world, “camouflaging his retreats” as incompetence. The screed sounded like the work of satirists at The Onion. But at least it credited the president with having a plan.